


Katabasis

by dragonofdispair



Series: Vampiric Codex [8]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampires, Attempted Murder, Blood Drinking, Dehumanization, Dhampir!Ambulon, Feral Behavior, Gen, Horror, Imprisonment, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death, Non-Sexual Submission, Starvation, Unethical Experimentation, Vampire!Deadlock, Vampire!Shockwave, Vampires, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:06:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23456740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair
Summary: At their lowest point, some find strength and others merely survive...
Series: Vampiric Codex [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1120587
Comments: 12
Kudos: 40





	Katabasis

**Author's Note:**

> Beta’d by humanalias

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.

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“What  _ is _ it?” The powerful, winged vampire almost sneered.

Ambulon watched with a dull sort of terror. The sensation of fear was different than it had been a few short vorns ago, before the Breakout. He hadn’t noticed the change, if it had been gradual or sudden. He’d felt only the terror he imagined an object might feel, wondering if this time,  _ this test, _ was the one that broke him. 

Of course a vampire felt fear. Ambulon knew he was not old, or powerful among the gladiators, and in the presence of these four he would have much preferred being relegated to the edge of the pack. Small. Unnoticed. Irrelevant. He could smell the vorns and violence and blood clinging to their plating. It wasn’t smart to be noticed. Unfortunately, he was the center of attention, his head being twisted this way and that, claws picking at his plating to move him like a doll, and Ambulon was noticing something very different about his fear. 

He felt like prey. 

“It was a vampire,” Shockwave answered the question. Starscream sneered again. “I have been attempting to alter the curse to mimic that of the ferals we found down here, with little success. This is my most recent ‘success’.”

_ “That’s _ not a vampire anymore,” the flier hissed. “It smells like a mortal.”

“It’s not a total success,” Shockwave clarified. “Only a step. For this I attempted—”

“I don’t  _ care _ what you did,” Megatron, the largest and most powerful of the vampires here, growled, making all the others stiffen at attention and fall silent. Megatron narrowed his optics. “What is it now?’

“You could call it a ‘half’ vampire, if my lord wills it,” Shockwave said tonelessly. “It was a successful experiment, but a failure as a product. More research in this vein is needed.” 

“Obviously.”

Soundwave, the only one who hadn’t spoken, reached over to paw at Ambulon’s plating now that the others were done, examining him while they continued to bicker around him. 

Ambulon hadn’t been a “rogue” vampire before the pens, and he hadn’t wanted to be one after the Breakout. His sire, the vampire who’d turned him, had been old.  _ Too old to change, _ he’d often said. He’d found Ambulon, already dying a slow death of a then-unnamed disease. He hadn’t asked if Ambulon had wanted to be a vampire, but he wouldn’t have said no if he’d been given the choice. After, he’d helped Ambulon finish his studies and set up a clinic, where he’d traded repairs for the poor for sips of blood. He’d never taken anything from the unwilling. Once Ambulon was set, his sire had left, never to be seen again. Despite his entirely legitimate status and nonviolent hunting style, Ambulon had been rounded up and imprisoned with the others as a gladiator or zoo exhibit. 

He would have preferred to go back to that life after they escaped from the pens, but they had all, together and separately, been driven below the plates and to the Decepticons. As a weak vampire, he hadn’t been able to fight when Shockwave chose him for his latest experiment. 

Now, Ambulon’s fuel pump hammered in the sort of fear he hadn’t felt in centuries as Soundwave looked him over, keeping his judgments to himself. Unlike Starscream, who was still screeching in offense, casting aspersions on Ambulon’s existence and on Shockwave for making him. 

Re-making him?

“Get rid of it!” Starscream finally shrieked. “This isn’t like your other failures! We can’t just train this one and expect it to be a functional vampire!”

“Agreed,” Shockwave rumbled. “It will be done.” 

Soundwave let Ambulon go and stood back up to his towering, spindly height, all long struts and sharp angles. “Deadlock,” the vassal whispered. “Give to.” 

Megatron’s optics lit up in glee. “Yesss. That is an excellent plan, Soundwave. We’ll see how the feral perceives this… abomination.”

Sharp terror that he was  _ prey _ here and now morphed into dull terror. The “deadlocked” experiment was a daywalker feral caged in Shockwave’s lab, though actual experimentation on this vampire had stalled. Throwing a weakened and bleeding vampire in there was Megatron’s current favorite execution method, as he seemed as territorial of his cage as any feral might be of his hunting grounds. From his own cage, Ambulon had watched him tear apart vampire after vampire, and still try to attack Shockwave every time he wandered too near. 

Ambulon couldn’t help a small cry of fright when Shockwave picked him up and effortlessly swung him over his shoulder. He closed his optics. There was nothing to see but Shockwave’s back anyway. 

He heard the feral, Deadlock, crash into the cage with a snarl as they approached “his” corner of the lab. 

Shockwave hefted his trembling form and dropped him. With another wordless cry, Ambulon opened his optics automatically just in time for him to hit the top of the cage with a  _ clang! _ Like Ambulon’s, Deadlock’s cage had been fashioned from a cargo shipping crate. Unlike his, Deadlock’s had been left almost fully solid, with only a barred window for Shockwave to peer into and a hatch on top surrounded by another barred cage. A feeding shoot. 

The cage slammed closed, and the hatch opened, dropping Ambulon again, this time into the pitch-black domain of a vampire-killer. His engine turned over and his rotors started to spin on reflex, but the drop was too short for them to get the sort of speed they needed to even slow his fall. He hit the floor hard. 

Ambulon screamed as he was immediately accosted by claws and limbs. He brought his hands up to shield his face and felt vampire fangs bite into one. 

“Bleh.” The feral spit out the taste of Ambulon’s fuel. 

“Hold still,” a voice whispered and Ambulon couldn’t help but jerk his gaze towards the darkest corner of the cage, furthest from the observation window. Deadlock raked his claws across his plating with a growl and Ambulon screamed again. 

“Calm,” the voice whispered again, this time accompanied by a reassuring touch. Ambulon looked into dim blue optics. “Let it— Oh. You’re a vampire.” 

The hand withdrew. And it was then that Ambulon realized that Deadlock’s deadly claws had paused while the mortal — it had to be a mortal — had been touching him. Because they started tearing into his plating again.

“No! Come back!” He lunged toward the mortal, only to be stopped by a very angry vampire slamming his weight into him and pinning him to the floor. Ambulon curled up as best he could and prepared to—

The mortal touched him again and Deadlock paused. This time, Ambulon just laid there, curled and shielding his face and breathing. The feral had stopped, and Ambulon couldn’t quite believe it was real… 

“Fascinating.”

Deadlock’s weight slammed into Ambulon again, this time because he was used as a springboard for the irate feral to launch himself at their observers. He heard the vampire slam into the cage wall again, and this time he smelled Shockwave’s blood. 

Megatron laughed. 

Ambulon didn’t know how long he stayed like that, curled defensively with only that single point of friendly contact while Deadlock sniffed and snuffed around him and the mortal both. 

“They’re gone. I’m fine,” the mortal said, and Ambulon’s rusty medical programming told him it wasn’t true. He didn’t say anything, though. He didn’t know what would break the spell. “He didn’t touch me. I’m— ah!” 

Ambulon peeked up to see the black vampire feeding possessively on the already weak mortal, fangs sunk deeply into the large primary fuel line in her — he could see she was a femme now — neck. His own mouth watered with hunger at the sight of blood, but he knew better than to take another vampire’s prey, especially mid-feed.

To his surprise though, Deadlock pulled back after taking only a few mouthfuls. It was enough to leave the femme trembling and weak, sluggish and gaze unfocused, but she was alive.

She sat down heavily and breathed while Deadlock patrolled the edges of the cage. 

Cautiously, he sat up, ready to flatten himself back down and… actually he wasn’t sure what had happened, but he’d cower for his life again because it had seemed to actually  _ work… _ if Deadlock turned his claws or fangs on him again. 

“Thank you,” he whispered to the femme, flinching when Deadlock grunted but the feral took no real notice. 

“If you don’t fight, he doesn’t kill,” the femme whispered back. “The vampires always fight, but…”

Ambulon had never been a dominant, aggressive vampire. Before the pens, he’d been strong enough to keep his territory — his clinic — his own, but that was it. Being re-infected with a mortal’s fear had turned him into a gibbering mess and he could smell how useless it’d be to try and fight Deadlock. He didn’t smell as old or powerful as the Decepticon High Command, but he smelled… involuted. Like the curse twisted in on itself until a knot of… something formed.

“I don’t fight,” he summed up. His optics were finally adjusting to the pitch blackness. To his slight surprise, the cage wasn’t empty. There were a couple of crates and plenty of scraps. And corpses, all in various states of being shredded. And the femme. The sight of her suffering was doing… odd and uncomfortable things to Ambulon. He almost felt like he was the one struggling. “Do you want to see if I can repair you a bit? I don’t know what I can do with all… this,” he gestured to the piles of scrap, “but I’ll try. I… was a doctor,” he added lamely.

“A doctor?” She took a labored breath. Even without the constant feeding, she wasn’t in good health. “I’ve never seen a doctor before.” 

“I don’t know that there’s much I can do,” he warned, edging closer to her. Deadlock’s gaze whipped up from the… thing… he was shredding further and Ambulon froze. “If he’ll let me fix you, anyway,” he muttered. 

Deadlock made a pitiable “weh” sound, like a patient with an advanced engine infection on his last legs. Ambulon had to snap his teeth down on the offer to take a look at him too. 

The sound confused the femme too; she looked perplexed beneath her suffering, and then shrugged. “We can try. Come on, there’s a nest back here.” She scooted deeper into the cage.

Ambulon concentrated on keeping his breath even and his gaze down as he crawled after her. Deadlock ignored them.

Soon, he fell into the familiar routine of repairs. He had to scavenge through the corpses for parts, but he relaxed. Relaxed enough to, on autopilot, bring the recharging femme’s wrist to his mouth just to check. She wasn’t healthy enough… but the scent of  _ darkness and violence, curses and fearlessness _ … i.e.,  _ powerful vampire _ and  _ taken, _ stopped him short. Bad idea.

It turned out to have been a bad idea just to check, because Deadlock pounced on him, shaking then tossing him away from the femme. Ambulon tumbled into the cage wall and crashed with a cry. 

He shook his head and froze when Deadlock came to check him.  _ Don’t fight. Don’tfightdon’tfightdon’tfight… _ He squeezed his optics closed and waited. 

The black vampire huffed and went back to his prey-femme and settled down on top of her. He growled possessively at Ambulon, glaring. Red optics like flames in the dark.

Ambulon decided it wasn’t worth trying to move and just laid there in a heap until sleep — sleep like a mortal, not the sun-brought torpor — claimed him. 

He was woken by a crash. He barely saw Deadlock collide violently against the cage window, snarling at the vampire beyond. Still laying where he’d fallen last night, he saw the hatch above them open, letting several cubes of fuel fall in and bounce in every direction. One almost bounced in reach…

Ambulon hadn’t eaten dead fuel in… centuries. Since he was turned. It seemed his newly “half” mortal form understood though. He salivated, fangs lengthening as he reached for the energon—

— And drew back with a cry when a shadow pounced towards the cube right as he touched it. He drew back and cowered against the wall of the cage as Deadlock snarled at him. 

_ Don’t fight. _

The femme’s advice continued to work its magic. Deadlock left him, taking the cube — all of the cubes — with him and piling them up in the nest where the femme still rested, exhausted from repairs. Ambulon looked on hungrily, but he didn’t try to go over there. 

Could he starve to death now? Ambulon didn’t know whether to hope so or not. Death frightened him. He’d never faced it before, not like this, but he didn’t relish the thought of being both feral and what Shockwave had made him. 

With nothing to distract himself from hunger, Ambulon tried to go back to sleep. He was somewhat surprised not to have been killed while unconscious and thought it was maybe safe to rest more. He’d managed to… rest, sleep, torpor or something in between… while Shockwave had been experimenting on him. He wasn’t… if he didn’t fight, Deadlock seemed content to ignore him, so he wasn’t in danger. Sleeping might be safer than staying awake and being tempted to do something stupid, like get up and check on the femme… or try and steal some of the fuel. 

So he tried. He really, really did try. 

He’d never, he realized, managed to rest while Shockwave was awake and moving around the lab. Shockwave went into torpor just like he did— had, so it hadn’t seemed really unusual. He’d occasionally even managed to ignore the massive “scientist” when he wasn’t directly focused on him. This time that wasn’t an option. Being unable to  _ see _ Shockwave was making Ambulon paranoid. He was hyperfocused on the sounds of footsteps and other movement outside the cage. Just as bad, it seemed that whenever he’d started to drift off into an exhausted and emotionally spent doze, Shockwave would step close enough to Deadlock’s cage that the feral would rush him, slamming into the window with the bars, growling and snarling and making a racket. Ambulon curled up into a ball and whimpered. 

Daytime  _ had _ to bring some relief!

And it did, in one way. Shockwave left the equation. But Ambulon couldn’t relax. 

The femme woke from her repairs and drank some of the fuel. Ambulon watched greedily, fangs extended and panting in hunger, but he didn’t dare creep closer to steal a taste. Deadlock, daywalker, was still up and patrolling.

This had to be a special kind of hell. He wasn’t vampire enough to be killed outright as a threat, and too submissive to just  _ fight _ and damn the consequences! But he also wasn’t mortal enough to be edible, or else Deadlock might have added him to his “herd” and protected him.

He whined. 

Then stopped when the feral darted over and started sniffing his plating.  _ Don’t fight. _ Ambulon closed his optics and pressed himself into the floor. Deadlock’s curiosity was nerve-wracking, sniffing and nipping aggressively and pouncing on him to pin him down if Ambulon shifted, but it passed and he went back to patrolling the small space and rearranging the various nesting scraps. Ambulon watched dully from his perspective on the floor until he realized that the feral was moving everything away from him, so that he didn’t get his scent on so much as a broken bit of a corpse. 

He was cold and hungry and terrified.

Ambulon had underestimated the amount of misery being  _ cold _ could add to his situation. He’d been a vampire for so long he’d forgotten that he’d ever had an issue with it at all. Being warm was a preference, of course, but the actual temperature hardly mattered beyond that. Now Ambulon ached with the cold, and the painful stiffness made him whimper. 

And so hungry. He hadn’t been the most well-fed even before being thrown in here, and now he was two cycles — three? four? — into having no fuel at all. 

It didn’t help that the femme was starting to smell healthier. She spent most of the time sleeping, it seemed for the same reason he was trying to: so that she wouldn’t have to deal with her reality. His repairs hadn’t done much, but he’d taken some of the burden off of her over-stressed self-repair, which combined with the fuel was making her… very tempting.

Deadlock rushed the cage window, and Ambulon flinched at the dull  _ bang _ and sudden cacophony of snarls. 

“He hasn’t killed the abomination yet?” Megatron’s voice inquired, sounding mild and less than sane. 

“Not yet. My hypothesis is that the experiment confuses him,” Shockwave offered disinterestedly, speaking over Deadlock’s rabid snarls. “He recognizes a rival for fuel sources and protects them from the experiment. Deadlock will either make a decision as to what the experiment is and kill it, or the experiment will starve.”

“Do keep me informed as to which. In the meantime… Soundwave.”

A deep  _ clang! _ from above answered him. Ambulon curled up and sheltered his head with his hands just in time for the hatch to open and dump the vampire practically on top of him. 

Deadlock was on the newcomer in a flash, already ripping and tearing and sending splatters of blood around the cage. This one didn’t have Ambulon’s instinct to gibber in prey-terror and fought back. Of course that’s what doomed him.

Ambulon though, he didn’t care that Deadlock was executing another vampire. He cared more that the fight was happening  _ right on top of him. _ He couldn’t even scramble away, he was so scared…

His memory must have glitched for a moment, because he squeezed his optics shut tight and then blinked them open and the fight was over. He was covered in black vampire blood, but the corpse had already been kicked over into Deadlock’s pile. Ambulon could see the lifeless optics glinting in the dark, but he was still vampire enough to be disturbed more by gaping wounds where the nameless victim’s throat and spark had been. That could have been him…

It still could. 

Some time after Shockwave disappeared again, and Deadlock stopped rushing the window, Ambulon just… collapsed from exhaustion and misery. He didn’t sleep, he just laid there. 

He wished he could have spent the time plotting to kill Deadlock and taking his meager herd for himself. That would have been the vampiric thing to do, but it was also the vampiric thing to know it was useless, so he didn’t even try to plan. Maybe if he hadn’t been a daywalker, Ambulon might have had an advantage. As it was… nope. 

He didn’t, couldn’t, know how late in the day it was — or even if it was the same day… — when, shivering and miserable and desperate, he tried licking the dead vampire’s black blood off of his own armor.

Yuck.

The taste was so foul it was hard to imagine anything worse. It lacked both energy and life. Still, Ambulon licked at it until he gagged. 

Shivering, he pushed himself weakly to his knees. He hadn’t moved in days, too terrified to do anything else, but now… he feared death in a way a vampire just couldn’t. Death from Deadlock’s fangs and death from starvation and… “Please,” he begged, knowing the feral couldn’t understand him. 

Deadlock bristled at the sound, then bit the femme’s neck to feed on a few mouthfuls. She whimpered, but didn’t fight, or even stir much. There were no more glowing cubes of fuel for her and Ambulon thought she must be running low, just as he was. Maybe the Decepticons weren’t going to feed them again. Maybe they all were just going to starve here in this cage… 

The scent of her fuel was intoxicating though, and Ambulon crawled forward, one shaky step at a time. Deadlock dropped her to snarl at him, possessively pushing her out of view when Ambulon’s gaze locked onto the dripping puncture wounds. 

It didn’t matter. Ambulon had been pushed to the point of challenging Deadlock or dying. Challenging him  _ and _ dying. He crawled closer.

Deadlock didn’t hesitate; he pounced.

Ambulon tried to bare his fangs, tried to score the black vampire with his stunted claws. He couldn’t. He’d waited too long. He’d never had a chance of winning, but his own vampiric instinct not to challenge those he  _ knew _ were stronger had denied him the chance to do some damage with his final moments.

He was flipped onto his back almost immediately. So hungry, so desperate and cold and already hurting, he barely noticed how the maneuver immediately shattered two of his rotor blades. 

And then Deadlock was on top of him.

_ Don’t fight. _

Ambulon wasn’t a vassal. He didn’t have the instinct to surrender, but surrender had kept him alive for cycles. Enough cycles that he’d lost count. On his back and helpless again, and more than that, hungry and hurting and utterly dependent on Deadlock accepting him, Ambulon realized he could surrender again. 

This time he didn’t just curl up and cower. Spark and fuel pump pounding so loudly that his own terror echoed around them in the cage, Ambulon deliberately bared his neck to Deadlock, hoping the feral would know what it meant: an offer of eternal submission and servitude. Something only vassals did, but Ambulon needed to be part of Deadlock’s pack, not separate from it. It was his only, his last chance… 

Fangs plunged into his main jugular fuel line. Ambulon cried out but didn’t fight. 

“Bleh,” Deadlock declared, pulling back. He looked around, snarling at the window. 

Ambulon didn’t dare move yet. Had it worked? Was he part of the pack now? Could he  _ feed? _ He was so hungry… 

Deadlock stood, leaving Ambulon where he was. He sniffed. Experimentally, Ambulon inched toward the sleeping femme. So hungry…. Soo… 

Ambulon had only seen a handful of vassals in his life, and never interacted with them closely, but he’d heard that some lords didn’t let them feed from the neck. He didn’t know if that was instinct or not, and he was no longer sure he could trust his own, so even when Deadlock ignored him crawling right up to the femme, he avoided the still-sluggishly bleeding wounds on her neck. Instead he went again for his favored spot when he knew he’d never see a patient again: their wrist. 

_ Life _ flowed into his mouth and Ambulon closed his optics to swallow and drink greedily. Even hungry as he was, he could taste Deadlock’s claim on her and knew he had to be careful not to kill… 

Just a few mouthfuls, though, was enough to keep him from starving. 

The femme… Ambulon looked at her again, sympathy pounding like an alien thing in his chest. She wasn’t going to last very much longer. Maybe not even the night, unless more fuel was dropped in their cage. 

“Thell me how tsu get outh ovv here,” Deadlock hissed. 

Gasping in surprise, Ambulon flailed, landing in the nest in a shocked heap. “What?”

Deadlock hissed lowly, and Ambulon lowered his gaze, submitting again. Submission was his life now. He was no vassal, but he belonged to Deadlock. 

It must have been enough. He retracted his oversized fangs. “Tell me,” he repeated slowly, “how to get out of here. I don’t like cages.”

That… that was a perfectly rational stance, if Ambulon ignored that his new lord had been wordless and feral just a short time ago. Unfortunately, as much as Ambulon hated the thought of bowing to their tormentors… “They won’t let us— you,” he corrected, since he wasn’t sure the Decepticons would ever let him out of this cage, whatever else happened to Deadlock, “out unless you swear allegiance to Megatron.”

Deadlock snarled.  _ “I _ own the dark places!”

Ambulon sighed. He sat up and brushed his hand over the femme’s forehead to comfort her in her fuel-loss induced stupor. “Megatron thinks he owns the whole world, and there are a lot of vampires — some old and powerful — who at least agree he should. Now that you’re aware,” nevermind how that had happened because Ambulon didn’t know, wasn’t going to pretend he knew, “allegiance or death are our only options.”

Deadlock considered that. “Allegiance it is.” He darted forward and Ambulon cowered back, but the feral — former feral — landed on the femme and sank his fangs into her again, feeding from and killing her.

Ambulon comforted himself with a silent reminder that she had been dying anyway. 

.

.

.

End

**Author's Note:**

> Here is a link to the [Vampiric Codex Official Timeline](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uS2EX-d3Npd00EkN2SxOa7010AUFPI0TVqiS2vbnsbQ/edit?usp=sharing).
> 
> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
> Feedback:
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